1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a machine-readable code image and a method and apparatus for encoding and decoding the code image, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for encoding data into a code using the arrangement of cells expressed in various colors or shades and decoding the encoded code using a computer and its peripheral devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, a bar code consisting of lines having various thicknesses has been printed on most products circulating in the open market in order to represent product information such as the type and price of a product. A bar code is made up of thick lines, thin lines and double lines to represent numerical data in which product information is encoded.
The home page address or uniform resource location such as the E-mail address of a company is usually printed on a business card for the purpose of general business. Internet home pages contain the promotional contents of companies. When Internet users are interested in a company, they read the promotional contents of the company contained in its Internet home page, and then try contacting the company through its E-mail address when they have an inquiry to make. In some cases, the home page address or URL of a specific company is also printed on the advertisement section of magazines or newspapers besides on the business card of the company. Also, published books can have Internet home page addresses of companies printed thereon.
In these cases, if a user wants to contact the URL printed on the business card of a company, the URL on the business card, for example, http://comsciyonsei.ac.kr/˜nklee, must be typed through a keyboard. Also, if the E-mail address, for example, nklee@yonsei.ac.kr. is printed on the business card of a company, users trying to send messages to the E-mail address must type the entire E-mail address.
However, Internet home page addresses or E-mail addresses do not consist of one or two letters but generally of over ten letters to several tens of letters. Thus, inputting the home page addresses or E-mail addresses can be a burden to users.
In order to solve this problem, U.S. Pat. No. 5,869,828 entitled “Color and shape system for encoding and decoding data” has been proposed. U.S. Pat. No. 5,869,828 discloses a method and system for encoding/decoding character data
Printers may have different printing characteristics, so that a color figure may be printed in different colors depending on the type of printers. That is, if an item of data is encoded into a color figure and the color figure is printed by printers provided by different companies, the shades of the printed color figures may vary depending on the characteristics of each of the printers. Accordingly, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,869,828, even when an identical color figure is printed, different color figures may be obtained due to differences in the printing environment, so that it is likelihood that the original data encoded in a color figure may not be correctly decoded.